Protesters march against the NYPD’s recent crackdown on the homeless. (WNV/Ashoka Jegroo)

Dozens of protesters gathered in Harlem on September 9 to demand that Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Police Department end their recent crackdown on the city’s homeless population. The rally, organized by the homeless-led activist group Picture The Homeless along with numerous other organizations, was set up in response to the recent eviction of a homeless encampment on 125th Street and Park Avenue.

“We’re pushing back against the de Blasio administration and his Broken Windows policy,” said Nikita Price, the civil rights organizer for Picture The Homeless. “They’re targeting the poorest of the poor. What we do have is our dignity and you will not take that away.”

New York City’s most recent crackdown on its homeless population has been fueled by the local media, particularly the right-wing tabloid the New York Post, as well as the NYPD’s attempts to discredit Mayor de Blasio and advance the narrative that the city is on a violent, crime-filled decline.

The Post has run multiple stories over the summer demonizing homeless people, especially one homeless man not-so-coincidentally located in the neighborhood of the Post’s editor-in-chief. The Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins set up a Flickr account earlier last month (which has since been taken down) and suggested that police and citizens “photograph the homeless lying in our streets, aggressive panhandlers, people urinating in public or engaging in open-air drug activity, and quality-of-life offenses of every type.” As a result, Mayor de Blasio, in yet another of many attempts to placate his right-wing, pro-police critics, recently approved a crackdown on homeless New Yorkers. On September 2, the NYPD was sent to break up the homeless encampment on 125th Street and Park Avenue weeks after the Postpublished a piece on its existence and, of course, blamed the mayor for it.

This crackdown was the last straw for many of the activists on Wednesday. Protesters insisted that the mayor and the city’s elites shouldn’t keep criminalizing homelessness in a city filled with empty buildings and should be more focused on finding people housing.

“Policing the homeless is not a solution whether they’re in the streets or in the shelters,” Price said. “This population needs real and permanent housing solutions. If you walk through every borough of New York City, you see abandoned properties that are owned by the city. That property alone could house every homeless person whether they’re street-homeless or shelter-homeless.”

Protesters began to rally at the location of the encampment at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday. After a few speakers and poets addressed the crowd, Picture The Homeless put on a skit showing the callous way that police often evict homeless people from that spot. Then, in a tribute to a related issue, a man sang the names of people killed by police along with “I Can’t Breathe,” Eric Garner’s last words before dying from a police chokehold, as the chorus. Protesters then chanted and marched to the NYPD’s 25th precinct, where many of the cops who harass homeless people work. At the precinct, as well as throughout the march, protesters held signs with the phone number to City Hall as well as the mayor’s Twitter handle. Organizers repeatedly reminded protesters to tweet the info out and ask people in attendance and people watching from home to call or tweet at the mayor using the #HandsOffTheHomeless hashtag. The protesters marched back to the site of the encampment and ended at a wall where local homeless people are routinely lined up by police before they’re forced to go somewhere else.

For many homeless people, being harassed and shooed away by police like this does nothing to help them and sometimes puts them in dangerous predicaments.

“My fear is that when they ask us to move, I’ll have to move, but I don’t know where I’ll be moving to,” said Angel Starks, a legally-blind 29-year-old homeless woman and member of Picture The Homeless. “At the same time, I fear that it could be more of an unsafe situation. Usually, where I move to is the park, and that’s a situation going on now where I won’t be able to defend myself because of my situation and my disability. And the police are allowing it to happen.”

She went on to explain that many homeless people refuse to go to shelters because of the unsafe environment there, as well as on the street. On the streets and in the shelters, they are often harassed and abused by both police and other civilians.

According to the Coalition for the Homeless, “there were 58,270 homeless people, including 13,985 homeless families with 23,490 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system” in July 2015 with the lack of affordable housing being the primary cause of this problem. About 60 percent of the city’s homeless population is in Manhattan; many of them have mental illness or other severe health problems, and an overwhelming majority of them are black or Latino. And though the homeless population has reached record highs during the de Blasio administration, the surge in the city’s homeless population happened mostly during former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three terms.

Homeless New Yorkers are often easy targets for media outlets and public officials with political agendas and have few allies able to fight for them. Despite this, many of the homeless activists at Wednesday’s protest are determined to stick together, look out for each other, and continue fighting to be treated like human beings.

“For my safety, I say a prayer,” Starks said. “There’s nothing right now that’s helping me but God. I can’t say that the government or the city or the state is protecting us, and I cannot say that something else is fighting for us other than ourselves.”

Ashoka Jegroo is a journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He has bylines in The Santiago Times and the New York Times' The Local blog. He has covered protests in Santiago, Chile and New York City. When he's not causing trouble for the establishment, he's live-tweeting protests at @AshAgony.

There is a battle going on between Mayor Di Blasio and Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg and their Press organ the New York Post. The massive rise in homelessness can be directly tied to the Bloomberg and Giuliani administrations turning over the city to their rich real estate developer friends who started a runaway Gentrification train and that is why so many are in shelters and on the street. I understand this protest was about the use of police by Di Blasio to clear homeless camps but the links should have been made about who caused this and Di Blasio has been a much better mayor much, much better than Bloomberg or Giuliani on Gentrification, affordable housing and helping the homeless. He inherited this mess much like Obama got Iraq and Afghanistan. This campaign was whipped up by The NY Post and Giuliani specifically because they want to get rid of Di Blasio and bring in Ray Kelly as the next mayor. I hope that we will be smart enough not to help them do it. Just two days before this protest the Post was lambasting Di Blasio for NOT using the police to clear the West 34 Street area of homeless people and when they covered this protest they used quotes to criticize him FOR using the police. People at these protests should refuse to talk to the Post as their agenda is really pro real estate developer and Giuliani style jails not homes for the homeless. We should be very careful not to help them remove Di Blasio and bring in a cop as myor [Ray Kelly] who was known for out of control police brutality at Occupy and who will be a thug for Real Estate developers and the rich.

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NYC activists push back against anti-homeless crackdown

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